Plot
It is breakfast time in the home of Henry Gow, a downtrodden, middle-aged salesman. He eats silently while the three women in his life exchange unpleasantries. His sloppy wife, Doris, and "horrible adenoidal daughter", Elsie, argue about her putting her hair up. Doris and his nagging mother-in-law, Mrs Rockett, quarrel about physical complaints, and Doris suggests that her mother move in with another relative. Elsie leaves for school, and her grandmother gives her money despite her mother's objections. Henry leaves the room, and the two women interrupt their argument to focus on him. They prepare to attack Henry, but when he reenters, dressed for work, they become sidetracked, and he departs, as the two continue quarrelling.
Later, at 7.30 that evening, Henry comes home (after a few drinks at a pub) unusually voluble. The women are leaving for the cinema, but Doris henpecks Henry on her way out. He demands that they sit, exclaiming, "What right have you got to nag at me and boss me? No right at all. I'm the one that pays the rent and works for you and keeps you. What do you give me in return, I'd like to know! Nothing! I sit through breakfast while you and mother wrangle. You're too busy being snarly and bad-tempered even to say good morning. I come home tired after working all day and ten to one there isn't even a hot dinner for me." He explains that he has been putting money aside, and he is leaving. He has transferred the freehold of the house to Doris and recommends that she make money by taking in lodgers ("though God help the poor bastards if you do"). With a final critique of each of the three women, he leaves them for good (taking his savings with him), saying: "Good-bye one and all! Nice to have known you." He happily slams the door behind him as they wail.
Read more about this topic: Fumed Oak
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)